Hen's Teeth by Manda Scott

Author:Manda Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448154876
Publisher: Transworld

Seven

Anatomy is the department they left behind when they moved the medical school to the West End in the late 1970s. The anatomists never really considered themselves to be part of the medical fraternity and saw no reason to disrupt the habits of several lifetimes when they were all happily fossilized in their insulated time-warp of a building. So when Physiology and Biochemistry and all the other pre-clinical departments moved into the shiny new labs in the hospital complex, the Anatomy Department sat tight as a single, immovable mass and suggested that if Mohamet wanted to know the secrets of the human frame, then Mohamet in the shape of 200-odd medical students a year, could put on his shoes and walk. Or, rather, hop on the Underground and pray for a fast train.

It took our class less than two weeks of shuttling backwards and forwards across town between lectures to realize that the timetable had not been designed taking basic geography into account. By the end of the first month, the class had split: some went to anatomy, some attended physiology and biochemistry and each group swapped notes. In the middle were the few entrepreneurs who attended no lectures at all and borrowed everyone’s notes on the night before the exams. None of them made it through to the second year.

In our particular pairing, Lee, the budding surgeon, had picked anatomy, while I sat at the feet of the physiologists and dreamed dreams of internal medicine. At the time, it had seemed like an obvious choice. Fifteen years later on, as I fought my way out of the southern exit of the Buchanan Street Underground through the crowds of drenched commuters, I wished I had paid more attention to the route.

I found the place eventually, guided by half-remembered images of street corners and old advertising hordings, in a dead-end street two blocks away from George Square. A huge Victorian sandstone edifice, the pale red stone blackened to ebony with age and a century’s worth of car exhaust emissions. In its day, it was the gold-standard of imperial values, designed to remind the good citizens of Glasgow that the Empire reached north of the border and the Scots had made their due contributions to the forward march of progress.

Now, the alley was filled with unemptied rubbish bins, and the stink of household garbage joined the background flavour of wet pavements. A sodden copy of the Sunday Sport was plastered to the step just outside the revolving door and a handful of loose pages had been trampled inside, jamming the base. I gave up trying to push the thing round and took a small side door round the corner instead. From the look of the trail of footprints leading across the marble floor into the hallway, everyone else that morning had done the same.

I was standing in the doorway, shaking the rain out of my hair, when I was accosted by Mr Archibald McNeill, the Anatomy caretaker. McNeill is a small, anxious

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